Fr0stbyte's Development Log

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Frostbyte, notice ^his^ sig? Do you see the light spots on the outside of the hull? Is there a way to prevent light spots like those? Because it would probably look odd for a ship in pitch black space to have dark and light spots.

Wouldn't it be exactly realistic? The areas of the ship that are near light sources like windows would be brighter.

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Frostbyte, notice ^his^ sig? Do you see the light spots on the outside of the hull? Is there a way to prevent light spots like those? Because it would probably look odd for a ship in pitch black space to have dark and light spots.

Wouldn't it be exactly realistic? The areas of the ship that are near light sources like windows would be brighter.

He's talking about shadows that come from the top direction, like they would on a planet.

I can look into dynamic shadows.
1) No atmosphere means hard shadows, which are cheaper.
2) New render engine is cheaper to draw than the old, so rendering depth maps will also be faster.
3) Quickly updating baked light will be cheap too (independent process from geometry and texturing), so that's an option.
4) In space you have a much smaller frustum to shadow, and you can cheaply calculate shadow occlusions between entities because of the sparseness.

I hope there's an option to disable shadows, I mean it's not like they'll serve much of a purpose anyhow.

Lord Mackeroth wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Frostbyte, notice ^his^ sig? Do you see the light spots on the outside of the hull? Is there a way to prevent light spots like those? Because it would probably look odd for a ship in pitch black space to have dark and light spots.

Wouldn't it be exactly realistic? The areas of the ship that are near light sources like windows would be brighter.

He's talking about shadows that come from the top direction, like they would on a planet.

Actually, im referring to the spots where a light on the inside creates a bright spot through a window, which is very unrealistic. In real life, the light would just go out the window, and you'd see a dot of light from a distance.

This has been something that's bothered me for a while, how the lighting system works. Its fine for small areas and such, but it gets odd when you get to larger scales.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

I can look into dynamic shadows.
1) No atmosphere means hard shadows, which are cheaper.
2) New render engine is cheaper to draw than the old, so rendering depth maps will also be faster.
3) Quickly updating baked light will be cheap too (independent process from geometry and texturing), so that's an option.
4) In space you have a much smaller frustum to shadow, and you can cheaply calculate shadow occlusions between entities because of the sparseness.

So, would hard shadows be dynamic? Like shadows from the dynamic light mod? And if im reading this right, shadows can be cast on entities and by entities?

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Actually, im referring to the spots where a light on the inside creates a bright spot through a window, which is very unrealistic. In real life, the light would just go out the window, and you'd see a dot of light from a distance.

This has been something that's bothered me for a while, how the lighting system works. Its fine for small areas and such, but it gets odd when you get to larger scales.

This would be terribly difficult, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. The way light works now is that each neighboring block to a block of light is 1 level darker, regardless of position. This is cheap and easy to pull off, and looks fine in most cases. To keep things from bleeding out, you would need to raycast from each light source to determine which ways light can propagate, and it becomes more complicated with each additional source. Even for baked on lighting, it wouldn't be easy, and I really don't see it as such a terrible problem. I think you would find shadowed point lights devoid of radiosity and those other nuances would look a lot more jarring than some occasional erroneous bleeding.

Quote :

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

I can look into dynamic shadows.
1) No atmosphere means hard shadows, which are cheaper.
2) New render engine is cheaper to draw than the old, so rendering depth maps will also be faster.
3) Quickly updating baked light will be cheap too (independent process from geometry and texturing), so that's an option.
4) In space you have a much smaller frustum to shadow, and you can cheaply calculate shadow occlusions between entities because of the sparseness.

So, would hard shadows be dynamic? Like shadows from the dynamic light mod? And if im reading this right, shadows can be cast on entities and by entities?

I mean hard shadows as opposed to soft shadows, which have blurred penumbras as a result of atmospheric scattering. Hard shadows require less calculation.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Actually, im referring to the spots where a light on the inside creates a bright spot through a window, which is very unrealistic. In real life, the light would just go out the window, and you'd see a dot of light from a distance.

This has been something that's bothered me for a while, how the lighting system works. Its fine for small areas and such, but it gets odd when you get to larger scales.

This would be terribly difficult, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. The way light works now is that each neighboring block to a block of light is 1 level darker, regardless of position. This is cheap and easy to pull off, and looks fine in most cases. To keep things from bleeding out, you would need to raycast from each light source to determine which ways light can propagate, and it becomes more complicated with each additional source. Even for baked on lighting, it wouldn't be easy, and I really don't see it as such a terrible problem. I think you would find shadowed point lights devoid of radiosity and those other nuances would look a lot more jarring than some occasional erroneous bleeding.

Quote :

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

I can look into dynamic shadows.
1) No atmosphere means hard shadows, which are cheaper.
2) New render engine is cheaper to draw than the old, so rendering depth maps will also be faster.
3) Quickly updating baked light will be cheap too (independent process from geometry and texturing), so that's an option.
4) In space you have a much smaller frustum to shadow, and you can cheaply calculate shadow occlusions between entities because of the sparseness.

So, would hard shadows be dynamic? Like shadows from the dynamic light mod? And if im reading this right, shadows can be cast on entities and by entities?

I mean hard shadows as opposed to soft shadows, which have blurred penumbras as a result of atmospheric scattering. Hard shadows require less calculation.

Ok, thanks for clarifing.

Posted some good overview material of the new render engine on the Minecraft thread.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/710528-futurecraft/page__view__findpost__p__14269955

Most of the implementation specifics are omitted, but I'm sure it will be sufficiently complicated sounding nevertheless.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

Posted some good overview material of the new render engine on the Minecraft thread.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/710528-futurecraft/page__view__findpost__p__14269955

Most of the implementation specifics are omitted, but I'm sure it will be sufficiently complicated sounding nevertheless.

Exactly; it's not actually what your saying, but whether it sounds important or not.

Frost, I'm aware you don't work with Minecraft's netcode much, but could I ask you a question about it?

Could the current netcode support fps-style combat with resonable response times? Because i've noticed before that actions tend to have a noticeable delay, and that makes it seem that ground-combat, with troops and such, would have too large of a response time to be resonable.

This could also cause problems with fighters.

There's too much delay because the servers are strained trying to stream data in a linear fashion.
Real FPS games will have a highly tuned and streamlined protocol for getting important data to and from the client as quickly as possible, and they will have all the latency hiding measures they can muster. In Minecraft, data is sent in the order that the buffer receives it, which means high priority messages like movement have to wait in line behind less pressing data like chunks. This is further aggravated by the fact that chunk loading can easily max out a client's bandwidth quota when you are traveling, meaning data can accumulate in the buffer faster than it can be streamed to the client.


So to answer your question, the current netcode really isn't ideal for a FPS style game, and needs to be addressed. And we will be addressing it.

Oooo sounds like fun. Challenge accepted

It sounds like the issue could be fairly well solved if there was a way to force something to the front of the buffer.

In a TCP stream, there isn't; order of delivery is prioritized. With UDP, however, you can change the order of queued packets up until the moment they go out on the wire, though with that comes more complicated states brought about by events arriving late or out of order. It's certainly not something to take lightly, but there is plenty of material on the matter and it's worth doing.

You know frost, It might be a good idea to post your current status or current project on the First Post, in order to prevent us from having to dig through 15 pages of spam and explanations to find your current project.

Current posts are usually near the end. I would recommend working your way backwards.

Frost, I noticed your planning on spherical worlds instead of cubic worlds, but why don't we wait untill the new version of gravity craft(which will include cubic planets) comes out before deciding.

First of all, it's going to be a while before we need to get planets working, so there's no rush on that.
Secondly, I sort of thought that gravitycraft got abandoned. If not, I would love to see Ivorius's take on the planet deal.

Third, cool sig. Photoshop?

I photoshopped an area 42 board.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

First of all, it's going to be a while before we need to get planets working, so there's no rush on that.
Secondly, I sort of thought that gravitycraft got abandoned. If not, I would love to see Ivorius's take on the planet deal.

Third, cool sig. Photoshop?

The public version is abandoned, as the new version is a complete rewrite. Afaik progress is being made, but I'll go and ask him later. And lol, yepnope.

There was a roller coaster in front of the movie theater like this once. NEVER... AGAIN...

Gimbal lock isn't so bad. If you want sickness, try 6 degrees of freedom. That hurts.

Are you working on fighters as well? I say you could use the plane mod with re-textured planes and a re-coded fuel system. Easier i guess.

Kobialka wrote:

Are you working on fighters as well? I say you could use the plane mod with re-textured planes and a re-coded fuel system. Easier i guess.

The planes mod planes don't really look like starfighters. I think whatever fighters we get will look futuristic, not WWII era.

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Kobialka wrote:

Are you working on fighters as well? I say you could use the plane mod with re-textured planes and a re-coded fuel system. Easier i guess.

The planes mod planes don't really look like starfighters. I think whatever fighters we get will look futuristic, not WWII era.

retextured. You could use all the fly coding though. Also, i hate it when people do not realize that in World War II planes were made of metal. Not paper like in World War I